This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the cross-screen measurement track presented by Nielsen:
Marketers face bigger challenges in measuring media consumption among different viewing devices, including mobile phones and smart TVs, to get a more unified view of consumers. The goal is to marry bottom-up measurement that’s common among digital advertisers with top-down modeling, said Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Brands have access to troves of data about how their ads were delivered, but measuring their effectiveness on consumers takes another level of research. TV ratings company Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population.
“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” said Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at Nielsen. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.”
Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, agrees that panel information is critical for in-depth insights.
“The reason the panel remains critical is that you need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” he said.
“In addition to measuring delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t try to evolve that measurement,” said Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at Wavemaker.
Measuring impact includes an analysis of how different media touchpoints help brands to achieve their objectives in terms of sales, awareness and brand consideration.
“It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content,” said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence. “We’re at the early stages of developing measurement solutions that really help us understand that into the media model.”
There’s room for experimentation in achieving results as measurement will never achieve a “perfect” level of insights, said Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at Wavemaker, GroupM
“We won’t have perfect, but we have to come at this from the lens of what is the best option for this campaign,” he said.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
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“The lines between what traditionally has been referred to as ‘television’ or ‘digital’ are becoming increasingly blurred,” Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at ratings company Nielsen, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you are an advertiser and you’re trying to reach your consumer in the most effective way possible, you really need insight that spans across all platforms where a consumer can be reached — not so much looking at data in the siloes of the past.”
Amid these rapid changes in viewing habits, Nielsen last year announced a plan to launch Nielsen One as a single, cross-media solution for more comparable and comprehensive metrics across platforms. The company will introduce the single measurement service in the fourth quarter of next year, as it seeks to transition the industry to cross-media metrics by the fall 2024 season.
“What we envision as part of Nielsen One is a cross-media solution that will allow people to make bigger and better decisions based on a holistic view of the consumer,” Gilberti said.
Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population. Its information sources include return path data from set-top boxes, automatic content recognition (ACR) data from smart TVs and census-level data from different services in connected TV.
“All of that data by definition wasn’t built inherently for measurement,” Gilberti said. “What we’re able to do with the Nielsen panel is to calibrate and adjust that data to correct for any biases and any efficiencies.”
While there are many sources of data, they don’t provide a holistic view of consumer habits. For example, a set-top box may provide about a particular device in a home, but not reflect over-the-air viewing, Gilberti said. Media planning has become more difficult as a result.
“You end up with quite a lot of waste today, and as a consumer, you probably can think of instances where you’ve been served the same ad way, way too many times,” Gilberti said. “The challenge in managing that frequency and eliminating waste comes down to understanding your audience and how they consume media.”
The Nielsen panel is representative of all U.S. TV households, based on census data that include age, gender, race, ethnicity and household size. The panel provides a source of truth for comparisons with other data sets, and helps to fill in the gaps among them.
“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” Gilberti said. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.”